Retool Copy Cats
is it just me or are there a ton of retool copycats these days?
- appsmith - superblocks - budibase - airplane.dev
what gives??
- appsmith - superblocks - budibase - airplane.dev
what gives??
But one thing is clear: retool is not OSS and most of the rest IS OSS.
The motivation should be clear: all of them want to free you from retool (a company product) and make you a good citizen in the OSS community as a user and maybe also as a contributor.
By your logic, wouldn't retool be "copy catting" OutSystems/Mendix/Appian, who are some of the OG in the space? They are 4x older on average
How is Budibase a retool copycat? It's a completely different platform. I am sure David would acknowledge that Budibase was:
- first to have it's own internal db
- first to have it's own automations layer
- is code optional vs you have to write JS
- we do DnD differently
- Retool was first, imo, to focus on the term Internal tools
- Budibase is open source
When talking to customers/users we're compared more to other tools such as PowerApps and Airtable, rather than Retool. That being said, we overlap on a number of use cases with a slight different in who we are targeting.
Have you used budibase.com before making such a statement?
Appsmith (I work here) started around 2019-2020 and decided to take an open source developer focused stance, because the core philosophy was that open source is a better alternative for internal tools, because they were substitutes for other OSS alternatives (like React Admin, Django, Angular and the likes) and we believed tools built on Appsmith ideally can proliferate across the organization and so it was important to have a model that that a) was easy to try, esp in larger companies (OSS helps there) b) was easy to adopt without worrying too much about the additional cost of every new user you add.
Budibase started around 2018 I think, but became OSS after a few years. There were a few other players like Internal.io as well as vertical specific ones like ForestAdmin, Jetadmin etc.
2021-2022 saw the rise of many other tools in the market, many of which trail their origins back to the Appsmith source code (Tooljet, Superblocks, Openblocks etc) as well as others like Airplane etc - some of these are open source (like Tooljet, Openblocks), while Superblocks is not. This to some extent explains why you're seeing so many companies come out in this space.
Even within the OSS options, there's also a difference in the licenses that each of them use. At Appsmith we use Apache 2.0, which is more permissive than others.
Starting an open source project means that you're ok with commoditizing some aspect of the product (and as a result the industry), which gives developers of these tools to focus on the next bigger challenges, which in turn further the industry.
This is still a nascent industry and there's a lot that each one is learning from the other. For e.g, Retool was a cloud first product for the longest time, and Appsmith (and other OSS tools) invested heavily in the self hosted experience. It was in 2021 after seeing the reaction the market that builders of internal tools prefer self hosting (since you're dealing with sensitive internal data) that Retool decided to offer a self host option (albeit at a steep cost), and I believe they've benefited from that quite a bit. At Appsmith, every day we also learn a lot about the use-cases for internal tools from our customers and users as well as from the other players in this space.
The user today is often still confused about what these tools are useful for (since internal tools themselves are custom software with endless possibilities), and hence you see a lot of companies in this space trying to educate their users on how to use these platforms and how they can integrate it in their existing workflows etc.